Google recently made some tweaks to their algorithm in order to penalize content farms, which create massive amounts of low-quality content tuned to rank well in Google. If you’ve ever run a search, looking for a solution to a problem, and found the SERP to be full of not-really-helpful results from places like eHow and Squidoo, you know what they’re trying to fix.
Unfortunately, Google’s changes have been affecting legit blogs. One noteworthy example is Cult of Mac, a blog that aims to provide “timely news, insightful analysis, helpful how-tos and honest product reviews about Apple and Apple-related products.”
Cult of Mac has experienced the opposite of Google’s goal: their content has largely disappeared from Google’s SERPs, while content farms and spam-blogs scraping Cult of Mac posts have been pushed to the top.
A lot of our traffic came from Google, which is why the changes are so serious. I’m already seeing a big drop-off in traffic. Over the weekend and today, the traffic is half what it normally would be.
I’m pissed because we’ve worked our asses off over the last two years to make this a successful site. Cult of Mac is an independently owned small business. We’re a startup. We have a small but talented team, and I’m the only full timer. We’re busting our chops to produce high-quality, original content on a shoestring budget.
Indeed, Cult of Mac does break a lot of stories. Along with the Boy Genius Report, Mac Rumors and 9 to 5 Mac, they together are the source of the lion’s share of Apple-related reporting. It’s strange that Google’s algorithm would red-flag them as a content farm. Perhaps it is a result of “splogs” scraping their content; maybe a glitch in Google’s secret algorithm is causing one of the spam blogs to be marked as the original source for some reason or another?
